The great British classical stage Tony Award winning actor Brian Bedford who was a star on and off-Broadway for years, has died at the age of 80. He was a protégé of John Gielgud and a theater-school classmate of Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole, but because he performed only occasionally in movies and on television he never shared their celebrity.
A regular fixture on the NY stage since the 1960's after making the US his home, he specialized in playing princes, kings, fops and faded aristocrats of Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov. However even with this fine body of work, he will probably most fondly remembered for his last performance on Broadway in 2011 in which he played Lady Bracknell in drag in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” (which he also directed) and which won him his 7th Tony Best Actor Nomination. Watch this clip of him superbly filling the shoes of the late Dame Edith Evans as Lady B.
Brian Bedford is survived by his partner of 30 years, the actor Tim MacDonald whom he married in 2013.
Brian Bedford & Tim MacDonald
Brian Bedford (16 February 1935 – 13 January 2016)
The veteran French actor Michel Galabru, winner of a Cesar Award (French Oscars) has died aged 93 years old. Despite his many heavyweight serious roles he will always be fondly remembered for play the ultra-conservative politician Simon Charrier in the classic gay movie "La Cages Aux Folles". When forced to don drag to avoid the Press, he bitterly complained that ''white was too fattening".
Michel Edmond Galabru (27 October 1922 – 4 January 2016)
The R & B singer Natalie Cole, winner of 9 Grammy Awards died today at the age of 65 after several years of health issues.The daughter of the late great Nat King Cole, Natalie rose to musical success in the mid-1970s with hits "This Will Be", "Inseparable", and "Our Love". Her biggest success however came in the late 1990s when she re-recorded standards by her father. Unforgettable... with Love, which sold over seven million copies and also won her several of her Grammy Awards. This track, a duet with her father, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, shows Natalie Cole at her very best.
Natalie Cole (February 6, 1950 – December 31, 2015)
Elsworth Kelly one of the greatest American Artists of the 20th Century has just died at aged 92. He is survived by his husband of some 28 years the photographer Jack Shear. Kelly's simplistic and highly colorful work made his work so highly accessible and here are just a few of our many favorite Kelly paintings.
Ellsworth Kelly (May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015)
The much belovedCynthia Payne known by all simply as 'Madame Cyn' when she gained notoriety as Britain's most famous Brothel Madam and who singly-handed exposed the hypocrisy of the country's prudish and ridiculousmorality laws back in the 1970s, has now died aged 82.
When the Police raided her very ordinary looking home in the London suburbs they found a sex party in full swing with naked middle-aged and elderly men waiting in line to exchange “luncheon vouchers” for food, drink, conversation, striptease shows, and a trip upstairs with the girl of their choice. As no money was changing hands for sexual services, she was technically working within the law. Her "clients'" who she insisted must be older than 40, included businessmen, priests, MPs, lawyers, judges and even a Lord of the Realm who all considered Cynthia as the best hostess in town.
The nation was outraged when after a Trial the Judge jailed her 'for 18 months for 'running the biggest disorderly house in the UK' and the matter was even raised in The Houses of Parliament where they passed a Motion deploring her imprisonment.
Cynthia Payne as she was released from Prison
When she appealed the sentence she was totally unrepentant and used the opportunity to lecture the Judge on the shortcomings on the laws on Prostitution. At the same time Cynthia really endeared herself to the nation with her hilarious outspoken views on men and sex which filled the tabloid press every day. The case made her a Media Madam too and she was soon back in business throwing Sex Parties . It was at one such party that she was hosting to celebrate the end of the filming of her hilarious biopic Personal Services (directed by Monty Python's Terry Jones and starring Julie Walters) that the Police raided her home for a second time. The ensuing Court Case had the entire nation once again in stitches as Cynthia kept everyone amused with her lurid tales of sex slaves, transvestites and undercover policeman in very obvious disguises involving all these harmless ordinary old men. She was cleared on all accounts of controlling prostitutes and Nicholas Fairbairn MP announced that Mrs Payne should have been mentioned in the Queens Honor List for keeping us all so throughly amused. In fact a couple of years later in 1988 she actually stood as a Candidate for Parliament herself so that she could change Britain's archaic sex laws. She formed her own Payne and Pleasure Party for the occasion. She lived in the same house for the rest of her life and although always known as Mrs Cynthia Payne, she never married. Cynthia Payne : a national treasure, the likes of which we will never see again : December 24 1932 - November 15 2015
The veteran Indian born British actor Saeed Jaffrey died at his home in London yesterday aged 86. This international star of both British and Bollywood movies had a very successful career that stretched back over 50 years and included such notable movies as 'The Man Who Would Be King', 'A Passage to India', 'Gandhi' etc. as well as appearing in popular TV shows like 'Coronation Street'. He was nominated for a BAFTA Award for his unforgettable performance in 1985 in the gay classic movie Stephen Frears 'My Beautiful Launderette'.
Saeed Jaffrey OBE : 8 January 1929 – 15 November 2015
Tributes have been pouring in for the novelist Jackie Collins after her death was announced earlier today. Jackie, aged 77, wrote 32 novels about Hollywood glamour full of steamy sex and drugs , and all her books have appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list and sold over 500 million copies in total . She was the younger sister of actress Joan Collins.
The Collins sisters were born in wartime London in a world far removed from the glittering fast paced show biz life that they ended up living, and that came to be portrayed in Jackie's racy novels. The fame and celebrity of the sisters was the subject of an affectionate and hilarious parody by the comic duo French & Saunders called 'Lucky Bitches' and it serves now as a wonderful reminder of how Jackie Collins made such a forceful impact on the world.
R.I.P. Jackie Collins OBE : October 4, 1937 – September 19, 2015
The news of some celebrity’s deaths hit you hard personally,
especially when they are somewhat unexpected.
Cilla Black’s was one such case.
I mean, it’s tough when you lose someone you grew up with like I did
with her. Not literally of course as I
was brought up in a nice squeamishly clean middle-class Methodist Orphanage in
the England’s leafy green suburban Home Counties whilst Cilla (then still Priscilla
Maria Veronica White) was raised in
a Roman Catholic working-class terrace house in Liverpool’s rather rough
Scotland Road area.
We didn’t ‘meet’ until I was
sixteen years old in 1964 and had started a phase of dating girls.She helped me enormously as I only had only
to turn on my transistor and play her Number One Hit record ‘Anyone Who Has A Heart’
and I scored.Big Time.She was like my big sister as she was already
21 years old by then and had just enjoyed a modest success with her first
record penned by her Merseyside mates The Beatles who had persuaded their
manager Brian Epstein to take her on.
I got confused later when I
heard the American singing star Dionne Warwick claim that Burt Bacharach
had written ‘Anyone Who Has a Heart’ for her but that Cilla had pipped her at
the post and reached the Number one spot where she stayed for a few weeks.It sounded like sour grapes to me but anyway it
made no difference as Cilla was already one of us and when she quickly followed
her first success with another No I Hit... 'You’re My World'…. I knew she was
singing to me, and whichever girlfriend I was foolishly trying to woo at the time.
These were exciting and
heady times to be a teenager in the Swinging Sixties and we had this whole new
world of fresh clean-cut wholesome pop music with trendy fashions to match.Cilla was part of this vanguard of natural
talent that was simply discovered and nurtured in those days and not
manufactured as is in later generations.Whenever she appeared on Television in her Biba clothes and her Vidal Sassoon
sculptured haircut we couldn’t help but like her, and we wanted to be be just like her too.After all she had been discovered by the
greatest pop band of the last century, so of course we loved her.Then when The Righteous Brothers sang ‘You’ve
Lost That Loving Feeling’ so did Cilla.The
boys made it to the top of the UK charts, but we made sure that Cilla made it
to the No 2 spot the very same week.
As the years passed Epstein
try to transform her from a singer into an actress but her efforts were met
with limited success as she was never any good at playing roles being other people. However what he did establish was that she had a natural
flair for comedy whether it was in TV or on London’s West End stages.What Epstein, and others realized after his
untimely death, that this untrained young singer’s greatest asset was that she
had tapped into our hearts by just being a very natural down-to-earth charismatic
Northerner who had an ability to see the best in everything and everybody.It seemed an obvious step then into hosting
TV shows, and before we could even blink, she was not only fronting two of the
UK’s most successful shows in television history, but she also became the
highest paid person on the small screen for her efforts.
From 18 years we faithfully arranged
our Saturday night schedules around watching ‘our’ Cilla try and help and match
up some lovelorn singles on ‘Blind Date’.This was mainstream television at its very best and although British
inverted snobs liked to pretend that the whole affair was far too lowbrow for
them, in reality none of them, or us ever missed a single week.When it started in 1985 I was married to
Peter and the only time we ever disagreed was when one of the light head bachelorettes
failed to pick the hottest man. I’m kind
of happy that watching ‘Blind Date’ was in fact one of the very last things he
and I did together the night that he passed away too.
Cilia’s other mega-successful
TV show that also ran for some 16 years was ‘Surprise Surprise’ where she
matched up families who hadn’t seen each other for decades.Always a Kleenex grabbing moment, but I made
a point of stressing to Peter that as much as I loved being a voyeur, I would
never ever want to be reunited with any of my dysfunctional family. There is
after all a very good reason why I had not clapped eyes on most of them for 50
odd years.
What Cilla captured so
succinctly was the heart of a nation, as even when she turned into one of the
shrewdest and most professional television of our generation she wanted us to
always remember that she was just one of us, and that life was really a lorra
lorra fun, as she would say in her heavy Mersey accent that she still reveled
in.Attempts at turning her into an
international star failed miserable, but we wonder if she really cared about
that?We certainly didn’t, she was
quintessentially English and we were happy to keep her to ourselves.It is testimony to how popular she was also
within ‘show business’ too as a host of legendary British stars have been lining up
today one after another to pay such very glowing tributes to a woman who will be so
missed by all her peers too.
We loved Cilla Black not
because she outlived and outlasted all those incredible musicians that made up
the Mersey Sound some 50 years ago, but because she was a star when you needed
to have an actual talent to be one on television.Cilla shared it with us with such boundless
enthusiasm and all that goodwill that you almost wanted to be one of the
successful couples that went the whole way on ‘Blind Date’ as you knew she would be at your wedding in
the front row wearing a big hat.
When Pink News made a list of 50 Greatest Gay Icons, Cilla was no.23 which was 9 places higher than Beyonce. However Cilla Black was not just one
of the major popular cultural icons of mine, and other generations, she was always
a 'lorra lorra fun'. When my very inquisitive and innocent 5 year old nephews from Northern Ireland once asked me years ago which really famous people I knew in London, I immediately lied and said 'Cilla'. They were far more impressed than if I had named Beckham their own idol as even they loved her more than even the Royal Family. So farewell Cilla and a big thank you too as we will have nothing but the fondest of memories, and I want you to know that I never blamed you for the fact that your
music way back then made those rather forward girlfriends want to go beyond
‘first base’ with me.Urgh ! I got over them, but never ever over your music or you.
Elio Fiorucci, one of the most iconic fashion designers and innovative retailers of the Swinging 1960’s, died on Monday in Milan. Fiorucci had a passionate obsession with everything trendy and British in the disco era and when he opened his very first store in Milan, it served as his vision of an outpost of the best of London. It carried the fashions of leading designers such as Barbara Hulanicki’s BIBA and Ossie Clark but he also packed the store with outrageous ephemera and novelty items such as gold-lurex cowboy boots, rag rugs and teapots with the Union jack emblazoned on them. He also added American classics T-shirts and jeans.
When he expanded his retail chain globally in the
1970’s with flagships in London and New York he reversed his merchandising
concept and as well as supporting the up and coming edgy designers of the day
such Betsy Johnson and Anna Sui, he filled the stores with never-seen-before
ethnic clothing such as Afghan shaggy coats and Brazilian thongs.Fiorucci may not have started the use of
leopard prints for everything but they, and camouflage, became totally synonymous
with his look at that time.
An energetic entrepreneur with a dramatic flair for
attracting the most fashionable crowd of the moment, he was the first retailer
to ever install a DJ playing music and he turned his Store on NY ‘s East 59th
Street into something approaching a daytime version of the infamous Studio 54 Club.He is also credited with being the first
one to introduce skinny jeans to the world.
Fiorucci sold his retail empire to the Japanese brand
Edwin in 1990, which he very soon came to regret.His attempt to reestablish a business in NY a
decade later failed, but then in 2004 he established ‘Love Therapy' a new line
of women’s and children’s clothing for Gruppo Coin a mass-market Italian
retailer.
queerguru spoke to Barbara Hulaniki this afternoon who said 'Fiorucci put Italy on the HIP Fashion map …he was an amazing fashion showman with endless ideas in his shop in the Galleria Passarella in Milan. He was the very first designer to put jeans on the fashion map…today there are vast departments all over the world of fashion jeans ……………he distributed Biba cosmetics for us in Europe …………after we lost Biba I worked in his amazing design officesand learnt so much from him and his enthusiasm for new ideas…I miss him so much!'
Fiorucci’s legacy will be for the crucial part
he played with his keen eye and energy for being such a totally fearless
merchandiser when fashion retailing was so adventurous, and experimental. He was one of the pioneers who thought that fashion was an integral part of lifestyle, but even more, that it should be both fun and completely accessible, as indicated by the twin-winged cherubs that became his brand
logo. The strange thing is that this
larger than life designer that made fashion so colorful and almost eccentric
was himself a very subdued and understated dresser.
Elio Fiorucci : an iconic fashion giant : June 10, 1935 - July 20, 2015
Out-gay Tony Award winning Brit actor 71 year old Roger Rees died last night in New York after a brief illness. Classically trained, he started his career with The Royal Shakespeare Company and created the title role in the original production of 'The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby', David Edgar's stage adaptation of the Dickens novel, winning both an Olivier Award and a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1982. When it was subsequently filmed for TV, Rees won an Emmy Award Nomination for his performance.
Roger Rees as Nicholas Nickelby
In 1995 he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in 'Indiscretions', and he received a Tony Award nomination for co-directing the Peter Pan prequel 'Peter and the Starcatcher', which had been written by his playwright husband Rick Elice.
'Robin Colcord' in 'Cheers'
Rees also had a very successful career on Television too, and he is probably best remembered for playing the snobbish Brit Robin Colcord in 'Cheers' and the British Ambassador Lord Marbury in 'The West Wing' for six seasons. As well as appearing in movies such as 'The Pink Panther' and 'The Scorpion King', his most notable role was as the Sheriff of Rottingham in Mel Brook's camp romp 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights.'
From 2004 - 2007 Rees was artistic director of the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival, only the fourth person to hold the post in its half century history.
Roger Rees and husband Rick Elice
Rees is survived by his husband Rich Elice who he married in 2010. Tributes have been pouring in all day for this well loved and respected actor. Sir Patrick Stewart tweeted earlier'Brilliant actor, dear friend and colleague, witty, kind, private man, Roger Rees died this morning. A space is left that cannot be filled.'
